In Vanda’s Room

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Film Info

For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.

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Film Essays

The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with . . .
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Film Essays

The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with . . .
Read more »

Press Notes

Before we put 2010 to bed, we thought we’d catch up with all the year-end lists that have sprung up over the past week or so. A good place to start is DVD Beaver’s annual poll, which ranks the . . .
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Press Notes

Criterion’s release last week of the four-DVD box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa—featuring Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth, acclaimed Portuguese dramas about . . .
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Clippings

Criterion’s release in a DVD box set of the trilogy Letters from Fontainhas is making director Pedro Costa’s name familiar to a wider audience than ever before. These days, you can learn a lot . . .
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Video

Film Essays

The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with . . .
Read more »